The symbiotic theatre: an evolutionary view of what's inside our heads apart from brain.
With apologies to Wole Soyinka

Monday, May 27, 2013

The Pentecostal bicycle

Sethren, I have gone up to the mountain. Not Sinai, but
Malham Cove, where many pilgrims were gathered for Whit Sunday. And I saw miracles of nature, the breeding
Peregrine, skylarks, the mountain viola, and the great heights dominated by the
silver limestone pavement. I saw from afar the line, no wider than the span of your arms,
sethren, where the argentine North West, with its limestone and emerald grass,
becomes the dun of Yorkshire, millstone grit.And from a young couple I heard one of those fragments of wisdom which
exemplified, in that ancient landscape below its big sky, the difference between
the culture of man and the culture of woman:

Eve:…something that I can enjoy as well.

Adam:Well as far
as I’m concerned, it’s a can of bollocks.

Middle Craven Fault, right of ladder of fields up to horizon

And on those heights I contemplated the big question, can
evolution proceed at the level of the group? which as I’ve said on more than
one occasion seems to me to be heresy.And it occurred to me that what those heretics are in fact talking about
is the horizontal transmission of culture, as it might be in biological life, in
the incorporation of one form into another; as mitochondria into our own cells; or like gene exchange, the slicing and splicing of the chromosome.And it bethought me this text, snipped and
spliced, might be appropriate to Whit Monday, the season when the Pentecostal
fire leapt across the multitude and across horizons, from disciple to disciple
of the last Jewish Prophet, a case of horizontal culture transmission if ever
there was one, but also vertical, since whence can this fire have come, save from
the temples of Zoroaster:

“Take the bicycle. From
the second half of the Nineteenth Century, the basic layout and structure of
the bicycle has been unchanged.And yet
from then to now there have been a successionof variations, thousands if not millions (depending on scale and how you
count) which have led from the first mechanically propelled human powered two-wheel-in-line
vehicle, to the huge spectrum of bicycles in the world today.And one can plot divergent lines of bicycle
descent.One variant is for racing at
speeds of 50 kph, another is for riding over rocks and tree roots, another for
performing gravity-defying aerial tricks, and another for going shopping in an
elegant dress; very different roles; all fulfilled by the same two wheels and
triangular with beams structure.All
these can be put in one phylogenetic tree.

However there is an area where these mutations are very
different from most of those in biological life.Though in the early evolution of life
extraneous bits (such as mitochondria) were incorporated into complexorganisms, the structural material did not suddenly
change with the totality that it is inclined to in contemporary material
production.The airframes of aeroplanes
were made of wood and fabric, with a few bits of metal.Then aluminium predominated.Now significant fractions are made of
composite materials, fibres, ceramics.Bikes were made of steel, and now they’re made of aluminium or carbon
fibre.No animal swaps the substance of
its skeleton for another over a matter of years in this way.The environment where the bicycle reproduces
cannot be a merely passive matrix, as the real world is for biological life.

As well as materials, substructures are suddenly
imported.Thus the environment where
reproduction takes place must have within it active processes, proactive agents.The change from the dandy horse, which you
sat astride and ran with, to the velocipede with cranks and pedals attached to
the front wheel, to the roller chain transmission, these were not small steps,
they were, in evolutionary terms, unaccountable leaps.

And that is the matter to be investigated, in the search for
anevidence-based case for Evoculture
being an evolutionary process which lives in obligate symbiosis with homo sapiens; a symbiosis in which each
partner has evolved in roughly alternate steps over a very short period of
evolutionary time, each in turn hoisting the other up by the bootstraps; brain
mutation, evolution of Evoculture, further brain mutation, further evolution of
Evoculture, following each other in expansive, exponential succession and
success.

The line of descent, the variations
that proceed in a certain order and not randomly, the divergence of lines (as
between the all-terrain and road bike) suggest that when a mutated bike comes
into the world, it is the product of another bike.But what aspect of another bike is it a
product of?Clearly not of the physical,
in-the-world bicycle.We are quite clear
that a bicycle does not produce another bicycle.It is equally clear that the bicycle ridden by
today’s champions could not have evolvedsolely in the brains of human beings.There would have been not the slightest chance of the modern race bike
existing if the idea had merely been developed and refined in and between
brains, without the parallel development of bikes-in-the-world. There is something about bikes-in-the-world
that reproduces further, and different, bikes-in-the-world.It’s not the bike itself, not the physical
thing.So what is it?The answer is going to be a formulation, a
word denoting one of many bounded but open areas of the metaverse; a praxis.What produces another bicycle from the bicycle-in-the-world is the praxis
of the generic bicycle to which the ideoverse of the designer has open access.”

Go in peace, sethren.May the flames spread, and keep a drowsy
emperor awake.

About Me

Old man, still puzzled, amused, horrified by the world. Question struck me, why are human beings, individually so intelligent, collectively so stupid? We have religious, political, factual beliefs that look like certainties. Yet if one lot is right (Yaweh is God, debt is sin) the rest of us are in error. That means most of us are wrong most of the time. How’s that work?
Seems we’re not rational creatures, though one of our special tricks is we can “do” reason. Our big brains are an environment where culture evolves. Survival is the driving force of culture, and a lie can usually survive better than the truth. Culture? Darwinian process in the virtual space where all our brains meet—not mystical, any more than cyberspace. Real, where processes continue. Needs discussion. So I blog about it.
I also have a life. A novel, Bad to the Bone, some plays on. I read, eat, drink a lot. My grandchildren say I swear too much, but what’s just enough? Crazy about mountain and road biking. I talk a bit, my wife says. Love music. The person who I have most admired ever is Wangari Maathai. Brother Jero is just the voice that comes to me when I try to blog about Evoculture.